January 3rd, 2019: Over The Limit

Thursday Rain and snow likely before 8am. Cloudy, then gradually becoming mostly sunny, with a high near 47. Southwest wind 5 to 14 mph becoming northwest in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible.

Thursday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 36. West wind 7 to 10 mph.

Walking or biking could substitute for 41 percent of short car trips, saving nearly 5 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from car travel. So why don’t we walk and bike more? We certainly want to. A recent survey by the National Association of Realtors found that a majority of Americans would prefer to live in walkable communities with transit service. But we drive because our streets have been designed for our vehicles, not us. And walking is not just unpleasant on auto-oriented roads; it’s often deadly. While traffic fatalities overall have been decreasing, pedestrian fatalities are increasing, up to nearly 6,000 people in 2017.

Most obviously, lower gasoline prices and a stronger economy contributed to strong auto sales and less interest in cheaper alternatives, such as mass transit and bikes. The rise of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft and electric scooters cut into bike commuting, said Dave Snyder, executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition.

And cities may be losing bike commuters:

It was down 19.9 percent in fourth-place San Francisco, 11.4 percent in fifth-place New Orleans and 20.5 percent in sixth-place Seattle over the same one-year time period.

"It shows that while we have made investments over the last 20 years" in bicycle infrastructure, "we are still far from having safe and connected networks that make people feel safe biking to work," said Ken McLeod, the league's policy director.

Yeah, getting doored by a driver is "colliding with the open door of a parked cab" like getting shot is "walking into the flying bullet of a discharged firearm." And of course there's no mention of either driver's identity.

But it works a little differently when a person on a bike hits a cop. Then you get a name and a breathalyzer result:

Intoxicated Bicycle Delivery Driver Crashes into New York Officer: A bicycle delivery man—identified as 27-year-old Marcos Rosas—reportedly slammed into an on-duty transit officer in the Harlem section of New York on... https://t.co/I4n2vM1Ofk